Van West-Charles: a relic of a bygone epoch!

Dear Editor,
Dr. Richard Van West-Charles has now added his voice to the political propagandistic orchestra; his rendition joins that small chorus calling for “fresh elections”.

For the younger Guyanese, Van West-Charles is one of the relics of that diabolical epoch in our country’s history, where rigged elections and political dictatorship pervaded. This is the type of politics that was intellectually conceived, authored and institutionalised by his late father-in-law, LFS Burnham.

When democratic elections returned to these shores in 1992, Van West-Charles departed; only to return when the seeds of authoritarianism were replanted after the 2011 elections, from which the joint Opposition obtained a one seat majority in the National Assembly. No doubt, when the APNU+AFC won the Government in 2015, he decided to remain, perhaps instinctively sensing the return of the type of politics in which he was nurtured.

Naturally, those who are familiar with his history will find his latest pronouncement most unsurprising. What is surprising is Van West- Charles’s belief that his style of politics can still prevail in the year 2020. It exhibits an uncanny level of naïveté that belies his age and supposed maturity.

Today’s modern democratic nations are run by laws, and not men. The electoral process is exclusively statutory and constitutional. No statutory provision or constitutional mechanism, jointly or severally, permits for the annulment of elections, other than by an elections court moved by an elections petition, filed only after the final declaration of the results of that election. This legal reality suffers no exception whatsoever.

I have pointed out before that this position is not peculiar to Guyana, but exists in every part of the globe where Her Majesty’s Government supplanted its legal system. The “qualitative” and “quantitative” irregularities to which Van West-Charles makes reference can be ventilated only via an elections petition.
Van W est-Charles invokes the old bogey of a bloated voters’ list as one of the bases for his contention. Late last year, the Chief Elections Officer, in defence of his list, informed the press that “bloat” is not an adjective he would use to describe it.

In any event, the current state of the list was well known to all those who wished to contest the elections. No one forced anyone to contest; each went to the elections with eyes wide open and rules of the game well known.
Worse yet, Van West-Charles’s party publicly proclaimed victory for several days after the elections. Now, after their attempts at fraud were detected and unravelled, and a National Recount of all the ballots cast has established their defeat, Van West-Charles wants a replay of the game.

Sorry, Mr. Charles; the majesty of the law does not permit one to approbate and reprobate on the same res.

Anil Nandlall